Time to kill the tiger

Mmegi Editor | Thursday December 1, 2016 12:23

From that tragic day in Selebi-Phikwe in 1985 when the first AIDS case was diagnosed in Botswana, the country has become world renowned for its aggressive response to an existential crisis of historic proportions. As the globe and Botswana mark World AIDS Day today, we remember the fear, confusion, stigma, hate, acceptance, determination and the battle the country has waged against the disease since those early days. We salute the many heroes and heroines, many of them late, who defied stigmas and spoke out publicly about their HIV statuses, encouraging many others hiding in the shadows.

We remember the millions of hours public, private and NGO experts spent brainstorming on strategy, which produced the network of initiatives and policies, many of them groundbreaking, that today support the HIV/AIDS response.

We stand shoulder to shoulder with patients and families currently living with this illness and commend their strength, resilience and patience as the search for a vaccine and cure continues.

HIV/AIDS, as an existential challenge united our resolve as a country to uncompromisingly pursue self-preservation, working across tongues, creeds and cultures. Certainly government deserves high praise for its innovation and determination in the response to HIV/AIDS, with programmes such as routine testing, Treat All Strategy, ARV therapy and Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission.

Over the decades, infection rates have slowed, stigmatisation has declined, survival rates have climbed and deaths have been reduced, but as Mogae reminds us, the tiger has not been killed, but just tamed. The new challenge for Botswana in the HIV/AIDS sphere is to end the disease’s new drivers, which include multiple concurrent partners, intergenerational relationships and associated factors such as substance abuse. Unlike previous decades where the epidemic was driven by ignorance and the absence of interventions such as condoms and ARVs, today’s new infections are as a result of poor behavioural choices. Unfortunately, behaviour is a highly individualistic domain where even legislation or policies cannot force change.

As we commemorate World AIDS Day, we owe it to the many victims of this disease to recommit to positive behaviour change and continue to fight for national preservation, that they began those decades ago. Botswana also needs to intensively introspect on the creation of a pharmaceutical and research industry to support the search for a vaccine and a cure. Several research efforts are underway in Botswana, using traditional and western approaches, and as a success story of surviving HIV/AIDS, an opportunity exists for the world’s most sought after cure to be found within our borders.

Botswana can and will be HIV/AIDS free by 2030, if we all play our part.

Today’s thought

“We lost an entire generation of storytellers with HIV” 

– David Mixner